D-Day 80: commemorating the Normandy landings
We remember the heroism of 1944 but also need to reflect on what it can or should tell us about our society now
D-Day, the Allied assault on Normandy on 6 June 1944, remains the largest seaborne invasion in history. Nearly 160,000 troops landed in France, 24,000 of them from the air, and it is easy to forget, against the context of the wider picture of the Second World War, that it was not an American-dominated operation: 73,000 were from the United States but 83,000 came from Britain and Canada. There were smaller contingents of Australian, French, Polish, Belgian, Czechoslovak, Dutch and Norwegian soldiers.
This year, we commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings. There are estimated to be around 100 British veterans of D-Day left alive, and it will not be long until, as we have seen the great battles of the First World War do, the events of 6 June 1944 slip out of living memory and into recorded history. Yesterday, the King and Queen, accompanied by the prime minister and the Prince of Wales, attended a ceremony in Portsmouth, from where many of the ships in the invasion fleet departed. Southwick House, just outside the city, was the location of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) under the command of General Dwight Eisenhower.
At every major anniversary—25th, 50th, 75th, now 80th—we find a reason for it to have a special resonance. There is nothing wrong with that. Commemoration is a central part of the way we absorb the past and learn its lessons, and of the way out society acknowledges the debts it owes to the generations gone before, even if those can never be fully paid. D-Day veterans are now nearing or have already reached 100 years of age. In a decade there will be hardly any veterans of the Second World War left alive, and the passing of the last one, even if we don’t necessarily know who it is, or when it takes place, will be a profound moment in history, the passing from consciousness of the most destructive conflict mankind had ever waged. It devoured the lives of more than 50 million people, military and civilian, and showed the world new depths of destruction and industrial barbarity to which mankind could descend, from the Holocaust in Europe to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs. And it shaped a new world order, giving birth to the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the atomic age, the concept of international criminal law and the Bretton Woods system of international monetary management.
There is considerable anxiety that D-Day is losing its resonance with young people. A recent survey carried out for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission revealed that only 48 per cent of those aged 18 to 35 recognised D-Day as the date of the Allied invasion of Normandy; 21 per cent did not know what it was at all; and 12 per cent thought it was when Germany surrendered to the Allies. Even when the question was extended to all age groups, only 59 per cent correctly identified D-Day.
It is easy to be Blimpishly outraged at this ignorance and fulminate about “the youth of today”. But it is concerning. We might not expect the man or woman in the street to know that D-Day took place of 6 June 1944, or that it took place across five beaches in Normandy designated Utah, Omaha, Gold, Sword and Juno; nor that Eisenhower was the supreme commander while the ground forces were under the direction of the 21st Army Group commanded by General Sir Bernard Montgomery (though both were titanic figures in the unfolding of the war). But it should hardly be arcane knowledge that D-Day was the Allied invasion of France.
More worryingly, the survey found that 22 per cent did not feel there was a need for D-Day or similar events to be commemorated, while one in ten young people thought such commemorations were “boring” and “repetitive”, and that the money could be better spent elsewhere. Those may be minorities, but there must be a danger that they will grow rather than shrink.
D-Day was important for many reasons. In the strategic terms of the Second World War, it was not, of course, the first Allied assault on mainland Europe. Having captured the island of Sicily in July and August 1943 (Operation Husky), Allied forces landed in Calabria, across the Straits of Messina, on 3 September 1943. The main invasion around Salerno by the US Fifth Army took place on 9 September, and the Allies slowly fought their way up the Italian peninsula. Two days before D-Day, Rome was liberated by American forces after the occupying German troops had withdrawn. There were significant numbers of soldiers committed in Italy: by the summer of 1944, the Allies had 620,000 troops on the ground, facing around 365,000 German personnel.
However, the total defeat of Germany was unlikely to be achieved through Italy, and Joseph Stalin continued to press his Western allies, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, to open a “second front” to relieve pressure on Soviet forces in the East. The “Big Three” agreed at the Tehran Conference in November 1943 that a full-scale seaborne invasion of northern Europe would take place in May 1944 (later delayed slightly). Four landing areas were considered: Brittany, the Cotentin Peninsula, Normandy and the Pas-de-Calais. The first two were rejected as too easy for the defenders to cut off, but the Pas-de-Calais offered the shortest distance from the English coast and was considered by the Germans to be the most likely site for an invasion (in which belief they were reinforced by a number of Allied deception operations).
Breaking the coastal defences of Hitler’s formidable Atlantic Wall and establishing significant numbers of troops on the French mainland was the necessary beginning of the final chapter of the Second World War in Europe and the defeat of Germany. If the invasion succeeded, Allied weight of numbers, air superiority and industrial power, combined with forcing Germany to fight a war on two fronts, would make it almost inevitable that the war would eventually be won. It was essential for that reason, but it was also imperative that the Western Allies had a physical presence as the Red Army drove towards Germany from the East. The fall of Stalingrad in January 1943, destroying Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus’s Sixth Army of 300,000 men, had effectively ended any hopes Germany had of victory in Russia, and the Soviet victory at the Battle of Kursk, the largest armoured battle in history, in July and August that year, confirmed the turning of the tide.
By the time of D-Day, Soviet forces had recaptured Crimea, reached the Romanian border in the south, driven deep into Ukraine and in the north had seized Novgorod and reached the border of Estonia. However, Berlin remained more than 600 miles from the Soviet front lines. At the Tehran Conference, it had also been agreed that the Soviets would launch a major offensive, which would be realised as Operation Bagration on 22 June 1944. A renewed Soviet offensive meant that the Western Allies must make their own push, thereby making D-Day essential.
D-Day may have been essential, but, 80 years later, it is easy for us to forget that its success was far from inevitable. Amphibious operations are notoriously one of the most challenging and complex activities any military can undertake, and the very notion of transporting hundreds of thousands of soldiers over 100 miles of sea and landing them on a heavily fortified and defended coastline was unprecedented in every way.
Nor had rehearsal attempts been universally successful: Operation Tiger, a large-scale exercise at Slapton Sands in Devon in April 1944, had ended disastrously amid confusion, friendly fire and the unexpected intervention of German torpedo boats with 749 American soldiers killed. Meanwhile, an amphibious attack on Dieppe in August 1942 had been a catastrophic failure with the deaths of nearly 1,000 Canadian servicemen, and the knowledge of the high cost of the German airborne assault on Crete in 1941 must have weighed heavy on the minds of the Allied commanders. (Indeed, while Operation Mercury, the German invasion of Crete, had been a success, losses among the airborne forces had been so high that Hitler forbade large-scale parachute operations and regarded them as a thing of the past.)
The D-Day landings themselves are well chronicled. They were immortalised in 20th Century Fox’s 1962 The Longest Day, based on Cornelius Ryan’s book of the same name. They were then brought back to life with vivid brutality in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), and the film’s opening 24 minutes, depicting a section of Omaha Beach, are mesmeric, visceral and terrifying. Many veterans attested that it was the most realistic depiction of combat on the Normandy beaches they had seen. One former soldier of the American 101st Airborne Division said simply “It felt like I was right there again. It was so damned real.” Another veteran admitted “That’s as real as a movie could get without the smell of gunpowder and putrefying bodies”.
Yet still we can forget that not only was it a bloody business, but it could have gone wrong. Utah Beach, the westernmost landing area, was secured with relative ease, although many of the airborne troops landed far from their objectives and could not make as much progress as they hoped. The landings at Gold Beach were hampered by high winds, while Juno Beach saw Canadian troops initially delayed by rough seas and then taking heavy casualties after the initial artillery bombardment had caused less damage to the defenders than anticipated. The landings at Sword Beach went largely according to plan, although the onward progress was complicated by traffic congestion and German resistance further inland.
At Omaha Beach, however, the setting for Saving Private Ryan’s initial scene, the American forces were very roughly handled. I have previously referred to this article by S.L.A. Marshall in The Atlantic from November 1960, and it is worth reading: the 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions met much stronger resistance than expected, and casualties were high. Exact figures have never been established but were certainly in the region of 2,500, perhaps as high as 5,000 killed, wounded or missing from a total strength of 43,250, and by the end of D-Day only two small footholds on the beach had been established.
At whatever cost, D-Day was, of course, a success, in retrospect a resounding one. But it had to be. If the landings had failed, either on 6 June itself or in the following days, it would have been a catastrophe for the Western Allies. Many possible consequences have been offered: Eisenhower would certainly have offered his resignation as supreme commander, the British military would have suffered a setback from which it would have needed a long time to recover, Roosevelt might conceivably have faced defeat in the presidential election of November 1944 and Washington would undoubtedly have reassessed its strategic options, perhaps preferring to focus on the Pacific Theatre. Germany would have been given a morale boost but its defeat was still certain, especially after the beginning of Operation Bagration by the Red Army. Nevertheless, that defeat might have been delayed, and might have resulted in an even larger Soviet domination of the territory of Europe.
It is impossible not to be struck, watching the now-very-old veterans at the commemorations, by how terrifyingly young they were when they were plunged into the maelstrom of the Normandy landings. Jack Mortimer, Royal Army Ordnance Corps, was 20 when he drove a jeep onto Sword Beach towards the end of D-Day, with German resistance still a very real threat. Corporal Keith Whiting of the Royal Marines was 18 when he served in X turret of the battleship HMS Ramillies, providing artillery support from the English Channel, and recalled the intensity of the conditions inside the turret, operating its 15-inch guns.
We shoved bits of toilet paper up our noses and in our ears. After a while you’d start to bleed, so you left the turret, took a break, replaced the toilet paper, and went back to your post.
Their youth is hard to imagine. If I think of myself at that age, at 18 or 20, and try to remember what occupied my mind and provided my anxieties, it is so far removed from the circumstances of military service, active combat and the very real possibility of death that it is irreconcilable in any meaningful sense. People adapt, of course, to their circumstances, and we must not memorialise the outward calm cheerfulness stereotypical of the wartime generation without acknowledging that many were profoundly affected, often damaged, by their experiences.
Nevertheless, it is hard to avoid the idea that we have lost a certain stoicism. When Rishi Sunak unveiled his hastily sketched plans last month to reintroduce some kind of compulsory military or civilian service—whatever you might think of the wisdom or practicality of the proposal—some of the more fragile responses on social media worried hand-wringingly about this imposition on young people and its infringement of their personal freedom. It is not necessary to be irredeemably immersed in the culture wars to look at students demanding the banning of speakers, or an unwillingness even to hear, let along engage with, ideas with which they disagree, and think we accept a much greater degree of sensitivity.
Like many societal developments over the past 50 or 60 years, this comes, of course, from a benign and beneficial origin. Undoubtedly we are a more tolerant, open and sympathetic than we used to be. Yet I do think we run the risk of losing a sense of responsibility, of obligation to work for a common good when necessary. Few would argue that the Second World War was a time of existential threat to our democracy and our way of life, and it was absolutely right that the state called up its subjects to make enormous sacrifices and perform selfless, almost punitive acts of service. And people did: by the end of the war, five million people had served in the armed forces, and only around 60,000 people registered as conscientious objectors. In addition, men and women served in the Civil Defence Service, the Women’s Voluntary Service and in vital war occupations in factories or as “Bevin Boys” in the country’s coal mines.
As an historian, I think history can play a number of important roles in our national life, and one of those can be, in a broad sense, as an exemplar, or a reminder of what we have had to undertake in the past. The commemoration of major events like D-Day is important because it reminds us of our history, which is a generally good thing; because it gives us an appreciation of the sacrifices previous generations, including in many cases our own families, have made; but we can also use it to think about and understand the importance of certain values like service, duty, courage and sacrifice.
So how do we do that? Former Conservative leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith has called for D-Day to be included in the curriculum taught in schools, because “this is about early decision-making. This is about setting the example of taking difficult decisions.” It would be easy to dismiss this as a right-wing, populist rallying call, but it has also been made by a D-Day veteran in recent weeks, and yesterday there was the extraordinary sight of the leader of the Labour Party, Sir Keir Starmer, proposing the same idea in an article in The Daily Telegraph. He argued that “this is not simply about respect for our past—important though that is. It’s about preparing for our future.”
I am instinctively wary when campaigners for any cause call for their particular issue to be included in the curriculum. Firstly, you will often find that whatever subject “ought to” be taught in schools in fact already is: good examples are the Atlantic slave trade and the British Empire, which are now dealt with both extensively and sensitively. Secondly, the time available for teaching history is finite, and the subject could occupy every lesson of every day of the school week and there would still be those who felt their essential issue had been excluded. I would also suggest, as a third consideration, that school is not the only arena in which children can learn. I have said this before, but smartphones have given us greater and easier access to all the information we could ever want than we have ever had. I fear, however, as I have written before, that younger generations are losing their intellectual curiosity.
For all those reservations, I remain alarmed and dismayed that most young people, if only by a short head, do not know what D-Day is. It is alarming not just for itself but because of what it says about our awareness of the past more generally, and the importance we place on it—or don’t.
Our priority today should be to salute those who lost their lives in defence of our freedoms, and of the dwindling band of heroes who remain with us. That is right and proper, and this will, as I have said, be the last significant anniversary for which we have more than a handful of survivors. Once that is done, however, we should not simply move on, but reflect on what the commemoration tells us, what it reveals about us as a society and what lessons we need to instil in ourselves, right across the demographic spectrum, if we are to continue to cohere and prosper.
Lesson to be taught is that freedom, liberty and democracy are precious and fragile. And the need to protect them and be prepared to do so by force, enduring cost and loss goes with it. If we can't do that, then those who oppose us, if they can endure, they will win.
DDay whilst primarily seaborne assault also involved substantial deployment of airborne assault forces. Perhaps more accurate to say, largest combined operation etc.